A Pet Tortoise Who Will Outlive Us All

It’s humbling to care for an animal that reminds you, each day, of your own imminent death.

CreditSpencer Lowell for The New York Times

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By Hanya Yanagihara

May 17, 2017

Every morning, Fred takes a walk around my parents’ yard in suburban Honolulu. The yard, though small, around 600 square feet, is beautiful, green and cool and jungly, densely planted with lacy native ferns and heavy-headed crimson heliconia and fragrant with white flowers: gardenia, plumeria, ginger, night-blooming jasmine. Fred is 15 years old and 80 pounds, and since my parents adopted him two years ago, he has never left this yard. When he is dozing in the shade, the old shower trees outside the picket fence that surrounds the yard rain their pink and yellow petals down on him.

People get up early in Hawaii — by 6:30, kids are being dropped off at school and adults are driving to work — and yet Fred doesn’t start moving until 8 or, sometimes, 9. By the time he does, the neighborhood is silent. Everyone else has already begun the day.

But exceptions are made for Fred, because Fred has nowhere to go and nothing to do, and my parents expect nothing from him. This is because Fred is not a human, but a sulcata tortoise, an impulse purchase ($250, from a man living a few minutes drive away, near Waikiki) whose consequences — as with all impulse purchases — were not quite fully imagined. Every morning, Fred must be fed: a mixture of timothy hay, romaine and protein-rich kibble, which is spread across a baking tray so he can see it easily. As Fred is eating, his turds — wet, cold, fat as hand-rolled cigars and strafed with undigested hay and grass — must be collected and the lawn around them doused with water. Some five hours later, lunch must be provided. Then, at around 6 in the evening, someone has to check that Fred has put himself to bed in his wooden house, where he spends at least 20 minutes bumping and scraping against the walls and the floor: the sulcata, which is native to sub-Saharan Africa, is like most tortoises a burrower by nature; in those arid climates, tortoises will dig deep tunnels in order to access damper, cooler earth. My parents’ neighborhood is humid — it rains every morning and every evening, a light, brief mist that makes the air smell loamy and slightly feral — but Fred is conditioned to dig regardless, his stumpy back legs chafing against the flagstones beneath his house. By 8 p.m., he is silent, sluggish; like all reptiles, Fred is coldblooded, and he will remain in his house until the morning and the return of the sun and its heat.

Fred is not rare: not as a species (the sulcata is one of the largest species of tortoise in the world) and not even as a pet, not in Hawaii, at least, where there is a largely Asian population, which associates them with good fortune, wisdom and long life. And yet when the occasional passer-by looks over the fence and sees Fred marching across the yard, his legs churning with the same steady, hardy energy of a toddler delighting in his newfound ability to walk, they are always startled. The surprise is attributable to his size, as well as his shape and color; at first glance, you might mistake him for a large rock, only to then realize that the rock is moving.

But I think the other surprise of Fred has less to do with his unexpected presence and more to do with what he represents. To be in the company of a tortoise is to be reminded — instantly, inarticulably — of the oldness of the world and the newness of us (humans, specifically, but also mammals in general). Nature has created thousands of creatures, but most of us have been redrawn over the millenniums: Our heads have grown larger, our teeth smaller, our legs longer, our jaws weaker. But tortoises, some varieties of which are 300 million years old, older than the dinosaurs, are a rough draft that was never refined, because they never needed to be. They are proof of nature’s genius and of our own imperfection, our fragility and brevity in a world that existed long before us and will exist long after we’re gone. They are older than we are in all ways, as a tribe and as individuals — they can live 150 years (and can grow to be 200 pounds). As such, you cannot help feeling a sort of humility around them: They may be slow and ungainly and lumpily fashioned, but they are, in their durability and unchangeability, perfect in a way we aren’t. It is all this that makes them unique and unsettling animals to live with, for to be around them is to be reminded, incessantly, of our own vulnerability — and our own imminent deaths.

Last July, I went to Honolulu to meet Fred and to spend the summer with my parents. My parents and I have a warm relationship, even though, or perhaps because, I don’t speak to or visit them frequently; until my most recent trip there, the previous July, I hadn’t seen them in six years. I live in New York, and they live in Hawaii, and while it’s true that traveling to the islands requires a certain commitment of time, the real reason I stayed away is that there were other places I wanted to go and other things I wanted to see. Of all the gifts and advantages my parents have given me, one of the greatest is their understanding of this desire, their conviction that it is the duty of children to leave and do what they want, and the duty of parents to not just accept this but to encourage it. When I was 14 and first leaving my parents — then living in East Texas — to attend high school in Honolulu, my father told me that any parent who expected anything from his child (he was speaking of money and accomplishment, but he also meant love, devotion and caretaking) was bound to be disappointed, because it was foolish and selfish to raise children in the hope that they might someday repay the debt of their existence; he has maintained this ever since. It is, in a culture that cherishes familial proximity, a radical way of thinking by people who otherwise pride themselves on their conventionality (though, lovably, their idea of the conventional tends to not actually be so at all).

This philosophy explains and contradicts their attachment to a pet that, in many ways, defies what we believe a pet should be. Those of us with animals in our lives don’t like to think of ourselves as having expectations for them, but we do: We want their loyalty and dedication, and we want these things to be expressed in a way that we can understand; we want the bird chirping when we walk in the door, the dog trotting toward us, drooling and hopeful, the cat rumbling with pleasure as she butts her head against our fist, the horse nickering and shuffling in his stall as he hears our footfall.

Fred, however, provides none of these things. Other than a series of grunts when he’s defecating, he can’t make noises. Although he’ll let you stroke the top of his cool, leathery head, he’s literally unhuggable. Although he is, in his way, friendly or, less generously, un-shy — every deliveryman or neighbor who enters the yard is approached and inspected — he is not a creature who, you feel, has any particular fondness for you.

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The author’s parents feeding Fred a strawberry in their yard in Honolulu in April.CreditSpencer Lowell for The New York Times

Owning a pet is often an act of assumed, albeit unacknowledged, reciprocity; when people speak of their pet’s unconditional love, they are in fact revealing the unspoken, highly one-sided exchange of pet ownership: I, the human, will provide you with food and shelter, and you, the pet, will give me endless affection and acceptance, no matter how crummy a person I may be. Children, being humans and therefore manipulable only to a certain extent, may disappoint; a pet is not allowed to disappoint, or else it won’t remain a pet for long.

Much as the role of a child has changed in the past century — from undersize workers to creatures to spoil and cherish — so, too, have the animals in our lives come to fulfill a certain need. Many of us in the developed world have easier lives than our forebears had: There is less arduous labor; there is less labor in general. But it can often feel that the luxury of time has been accompanied by a heightened, commensurate craving for love: Part of the modern condition is wondering who might love us and how that love might be more perfectly expressed, and animals’ new duty is to answer both of those problems, to make this loneliest of ages feel a little less lonely.

Being with Fred, therefore, makes me re-evaluate why we keep pets at all. Along with his inability to behave as a modern pet ought, his appeal as an animate being is of a specific and subtle kind: He is stolid and implacable, neither of which are traits we typically value in any species we hope to employ as companions. Then there is the fact of the amount of care he demands, which is accompanied by the contradictory suspicion that he might be perfectly content on his own, without us: As much as he may enjoy them, Fred doesn’t actually need company, or water, or even food; were he at home in Sudan, he would be eating (dry grasses; shrubbery) only every few days. To own a turtle, then, means accepting that you will be seen as the neighborhood eccentrics, people who have chosen a secondary position in their own households. If people who love cats are self-assured (but self-absorbed), and people who love dogs are self-satisfied (but insecure), then it might be said that people who love turtles are, to some degree, fatalistic: Loving a turtle means pouring endless amounts of affection into a bucket that will never fill because it has a hole cut in its bottom.

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Fred about to eat a red hibiscus flower, his favorite snack.CreditSpencer Lowell for The New York Times

And yet Fred’s presence in my parents’ life seemed to be an expression of something beyond mere eccentricity: As the days passed, I couldn’t help seeing him as a late-in-life yank of the parental tether. My parents are 71 and 69; I am 42. Fred, therefore, will most likely outlive not only my father and mother but me as well. In the midafternoon, when Fred was at his most alert, I would sit and watch him: his asplike face, his determined, plucky trudge, which made his head bounce a little with every step, his piggy nostrils, each the size and shape of a watermelon seed, the faint, coin-size indentations on the side of his head where his ears lay. As I watched him, I wondered: Why would my parents assume such a responsibility? Why would they bring into their — my; our — lives something so disruptive?

The easy explanation was that they had simply chosen not to consider it: My parents are young enough and unsentimental enough that death (how, when, where) was still sufficiently distant to be an abstraction, a dinner-table conversation. But though they claimed to be ready to die at any moment — they had reached an age in which they viewed life as a contractor’s punch list, a series of tasks that had been satisfactorily, or at least competently, completed — Fred’s arrival belied those claims. Their adoption of him suggested that they might actually have expected something from my brother and me after all. My parents weren’t upset when we left home (they were in fact pretty gleeful), and yet here, in Fred, was a collective problem, a challenge that would force a reunion of our small family. For what, after all, makes adult children remain in contact with their parents? Fondness, of course; love. But in the absence of or in addition to those, there is inheritance, the stuff (and quarrels and resentments) that will be left behind when the parents die.

In a post-industrialized country and era, there are fewer and fewer practical reasons for a family to stay together once its children are grown. We do so out of tradition, but tradition isn’t an imperative. Fred, however, was his own imperative, a difficulty that demanded a response, a legacy that, unlike a car or a house, needed a caretaker, an animal who was both a repository of a surplus of parental love and an announcement of parental need: Come home. See what we’ve taken on. When you see him, will you remember us? Fred was a way of requesting devotion without having to literally ask.

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Fred’s shell.CreditSpencer Lowell for The New York Times

I wish I could say that we had decided what to do with Fred by the time I left Hawaii, but we hadn’t. Instead, we watched Fred circle the yard, speaking of him with the same affectionate bewilderment we would a precocious child. I had already told my parents that I wouldn’t take Fred when they died; my brother said he wouldn’t, either. Our refusal seemed to provide them with a curious, even paradoxical contentment — my brother and I might not need them to stay alive (we would like them to, but like is not the same as need), but Fred did, or so they could believe. And so, for him, they would. If one of pets’ great gifts is their ability to make us feel loved, their greater gift is how they make us feel necessary.

In the months after my return home, my parents sent me messages: Fred was getting bigger. He had broken through one of the metal gates and tried to escape. He was having diarrhea. He liked only red hibiscus, not pink. He had rejected the Swiss chard they tried to feed him. He was a whim that was becoming a burden. And yet they couldn’t imagine letting him go. He was their pet, and they were going to take care of him, even if they didn’t truly understand what that might entail. But what person who’s responsible for another living creature ever really understands what care entails? You may think you know, or have some sense. But you never truly know until you are doing the actual work of caring, in particular for something that may not care for you in return but to whom you have sworn your allegiance.

Sometimes, after reading these messages, I found myself slipping into a daydream, imagining Fred’s life — and, by extension, my own — years into the future. I imagined a day in which my parents were dead and still no one had determined what to do with Fred: where he would live, who would talk to him. I imagined Fred edging out of his wooden house to find something to eat, a young specimen of an old species on a young island in an old world. I imagined him sitting, and waiting, for someone to come feed him. And when no one did? Maybe he would start eating the grass. And then when the grass was gone, he might eat the petals from the shower trees. And then the ferns. And then the ti leaves. And then the gardenia bushes. He would eat and eat, and when the yard had been denuded of anything green, he would wait until the lawn turned green once more. A tortoise knows how to wait. It is another piece of wisdom that comes from being a member of a species that is so very old.

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Fred retreating into his wooden house.CreditSpencer Lowell for The New York Times

He was, I always thought, an unattractive animal: his eyes might kindly be called beady, his mouth a puckered seam — the writer Jane Gardam once described a tortoise as having “an old man’s mean little mouth” — but over my summer with my parents, I also realized that I was mesmerized by him — even that I respected him. How could I not? An animal that demands so little and craves even less? An animal so unlike the animal I am, one with such a developed sense of self-possession? What secret did Fred know that I did not?

In those daydreams, I would think of how, when the light was winy and golden, I liked to sit on the porch steps and watch Fred trundle across the lawn. A few weeks into my stay, we’d grown familiar enough that he would toddle right up to me and stretch out his neck, its skin sagging into crepey pleats, and let me pat his head, closing his little black eyes as I did. In those moments, I found myself talking to him, usually about banal things: asking if he’d enjoyed the hibiscus flowers I’d snapped off a neighbor’s bush; if he could feel the myna birds that occasionally perched on his back. This time, though, I asked him something else, something more intimate, something about what it was like to be the creature he was, what it was like to live without a sense of obligation or pity or guilt — all the things that make being a human so sad and so mysterious and so wondrously rich.

He didn’t answer, of course. But for a moment, he held his position, his head motionless beneath my hand, a short pause in his very long life. And then he moved on — and I stood and watched him go.

Hanya Yanagihara is the new editor in chief of T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Her novel “A Little Life” was a finalist for the 2015 Man Booker Prize.

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